Nashville Arts Critic
June 17, 2015
OZ Arts Nashville Hosts NYC’s Phantom Limb ‘Memory Rings’ World Premiere
OZ Arts Nashville welcomes New York City’s highly regarded Phantom Limb Company for the world premiere of Memory Rings, which artists in part developed during a two-week residency at the contemporary arts center last year. The theatrical collage combines fairytale, fable, puppetry, choreography, original music and striking visual design and tells a story spanning 5,000 years of human and environmental change under the watchful gaze of the world’s oldest living tree. It will later travel to CAP UCLA in Los Angeles and BAM in NYC.
Phantom Limb Company will perform the 75-minute work for the publicFriday and Saturday (June 19-20) at 7 p.m. Tickets ($35-$47.50) can be purchased by clicking here. OZ Arts Nashville is located at 6172 Cockrill Bend Circle.
Inspired by the Methuselah Tree, a California bristlecone pine estimated to be more than 4,800 years old, Memory Rings is the second installment in Phantom Limb’s trilogy of original works about the environment. Its time-bending forest dreamscapes—incorporating everything from the epic tale ofGilgamesh to our penchant for Google searches—chart the humor and hubris of our species, the loss of our identification with the natural world, and the hope that we may yet be able to rewrite our story.
In Memory Rings, we watch as a family’s increasingly fraught and sometimes comic interactions with each other, technology and the outside world unfold in wordless but recognizable vignettes. Directed and designed by visual artist/designer Jessica Grindstaff, the spectacular production features puppets by her Phantom Limb co-founder Erik Sanko and choreography byRyan Heffington, best known for his collaborations with pop music artists such as Florence and the Machine, FKA Twigs and Arcade Fire. (He won Best Choreography at the MTV Video Music Awards for his work on Sia’s “Chandelier.”) Marionettes and dancers with full head masks—blurring the boundaries between human and animal, present and past, dream and reality—depict the many characters lurking in our forests. Indeed, the environment itself is a central character in the story, supported by evocative projections byKeith Skretch (a celebrated collaborator of Big Dance Theater, Mallory Catlett, Jay Scheib and others) and a lush soundscape by Sanko and sound designer Darron L. West (Trisha Brown, Bill T. Jones, Peter and the Starcatcher on Broadway). Eventually, the family, fairy tale and natural worlds collide in an unforgettable moment of reckoning.
Memory Rings is a meditation on the way we live now—on our conflicted, uneasy relationship with the subjects of climate change and environmental degradation. Grindstaff says of Memory Rings, “Reams have already been written about the environmental crisis, a topic that demands our attention but is typically met with avoidance or fatigue. And though numerous artists are tackling it from a variety of perspectives, the results are often unsatisfying: naive, didactic, or sentimental.” Drawing inspiration from The Dark Mountain Project, an alliance of writers and artists founded by ex-environmental activistPaul Kingsnorth, Phantom Limb is less interested in the “save the world” strategies of climate scientists and political action groups than in carving out, in Memory Rings, “a space to sit with our apprehension, our grief, our foolishness and our hope.”
Memory Rings is commissioned by BAM (for the Next Wave Festival in 2016), CAP UCLA, and the New York University Abu Dhabi Arts Center. Development residencies have been provided by OZ Arts Nashville, theRobert Rauschenberg Foundation/Rauschenberg Residency, MASS MoCA and The Hermitage. Additional support has been provided by the Jim Henson Foundation and New Music USA.
Memory Rings is produced by Mara Isaacs, Octopus Theatricals. Here’s a video shot lost year when the piece was being developed at OZ Arts Nashville:
Phantom Limb Company has garnered international acclaim for marionette puppetry and for its collaborative, multimedia theatrical productions. Co-founded in 2007 by installation artist, painter and set designer Jessica Grindstaff and composer and puppet maker Erik Sanko, the has produced The Fortune Teller; Dear Mme.; The Devil You Know, with Ping Chong; Lemony Snicket’s The Composer Is Dead, with Berkeley Repertory Theatre; 69 ̊ S., with The Kronos Quartet; and Peer Gynt with Republique Theatre in Copenhagen. Future productions are a top secret theatrical experience on a boat in NYC framed around Moby Dick and the third installment of their environmental trilogy, based around water, butoh, puppetry and Fukushima.
About OZ Arts Nashville
The 501(c)3 nonprofit contemporary arts institution presents the work of leading artists from around the world, offering an intimate context for performing and visual art programs that challenge and inspire a diverse range of curious audiences.
OZ Arts also serves as a catalyst for local creativity through a program called TNT (Thursday Night Things). TNT is a quarterly series of unexpected collaborations with Nashville-based artists from varying creative disciplines. OZ Arts’ “blank slate” provides a platform onto which these artists can create, develop and present a one-time-only event that would traditionally not be seen in a visual art gallery or theatre.
OZ Arts is located in the former C.A.O. cigar warehouse owned by Nashville’s Ozgener family. Their generosity provided the seed money that breathed new life into the column-free, 10,000 square-foot space nestled amidst artfully landscaped grounds.
For more information and tickets, go to www.OZArtsNashville.org.
*Photos by Daniel Leeb courtesy Phantom Limb Company and OZ Arts Nashville.